Abstract

Ali Smith’s There but for the (2011) represents a change in Smith’s work from metaphorical meditations on the stranger who enters domestic space to a more literal representation of the specific politics of asylum issues. In There but for the this political intervention takes the form of explicit engagement with the stories of people seeking asylum, and runs alongside Smith’s activism with the Refugee Tales Project. Through some dialogue with Derrida’s Of Hospitality, this essay argues that Smith’s recent fiction uses the passport and things that are offered in its absence – things that pass for a passport – as a way of exploring broader processes of analogy that compare the welcome offered to the stranger in the home to the welcome offered to strangers at the border.